What I Can't Bear Losing is a memoir composed of 20 essays by poet Gerald Stern. Each essay encapsulates a snapshot of time in Stern's life: Sundays in Calvinist Pittsburgh, romance in 1950s Paris, a run-in with Andy Warhol. "The Beacon" is the second essay in Stern's collection; its description of a scuffle outside of the Beacon Pharmacy in Squirrel Hill illustrates a type of racial hatred that was rampant as America was entering World War II.

Foo's name was Sidney Santman though I could as easily say that Sidney Santman's name was Foo. We were friends during the war, part of a forlorn group of young men with various kinds of deformities and deficiencies that made us unfit for military service, though much of that had to do with the needs of the local draft board and even the demands of the government which, from time to time, relaxed some of its restrictions, it was so short of manpower. I was one of them, doomed--or saved--because of bad eyesight, not even qualified for "limited" service, though I was able to play football well enough and run the mile and even, it turned out, when I was finally drafted--five months after we dropped the bombs--I was able to knock a few people down in the small ring, with the oversized gloves we wore, and helmets, at the Virginia camp where I was stationed at the end of my tenure.

I don't know why Foo was 4F. The doctors kept you out for the oddest things. I had a feeling that in his case it was asthma. Many years later, 1980 probably, I ran into Foo in a deli in Pittsburgh and we hugged and talked. I was shocked to see that he had fingers missing from one of his hands and retained only the index and the thumb. It was an accident in a machine shop he owned. That would have certainly kept him out, but by that time we had no more wars to go to.

During World War II he managed a small settlement house in the part of Squirrel Hill south of Forbes, mostly Jewish. He spent much of his time at his oversized desk writing letters to his friends in the service, and the battle at Anzio and the slaughter was much on our minds. We used to meet about nine--two or three of us--usually there were no clients then, play some basketball, take a shower, and then walk the three or four blocks up the hill to the Beacon Pharmacy, where we'd eat sundaes or pie and coffee before we walked home. Foo always bought a Post-Gazette, a morning paper (it is Pittsburgh's only remaining paper) from a small black newsboy on the corner. It was a ritual that they would play the Dozens every night and Foo would generally give him a quarter or fifty cents, good money then. The Dozens is a street ritual where the two contestants insult each other's families, particularly mothers, a macabre game of one-upmanship that was practiced in the African-American community on the Hill, and Foo, who still lived there, was very adept at the game. They--Foo and the newsboy, maybe fourteen years old--threw the verbal slings back and forth. ("Yo' mutha' ain't got no drawers." "Yo' mutha' got 'em, but she don't wear 'em." "Yo' mutha' like a slaughter house, she either full o' shit or full o' blood." "You ain't got no mutha', you got two bald-headed daddies." "I seen yo' mutha' down at the police station where all the dicks hang out.")

The game usually ended in a shouting match and hugging, but one night Foo seemed especially hard, or the newsboy especially sensitive, for the boy began to cry and, through his tears, continue to shout insults at Foo. Foo tried giving him a dollar, but he followed us (Foo and me) up the street, tears pouring down his face, shouting, "You big fat mutha' fucka'." Money wouldn't pacify him; he followed us past the Orthodox synagogue on our right, even past the deli where Foo and I ran into each other again thirty-seven years later--before going back to his papers. Foo looked nervously around him--I'm sure he was terrified of meeting one of his board members on the way, half-shocked, half-amused. We arrived at the Beacon Pharmacy a little subdued and pensive--and remorseful--and had our fruit salad sundaes in silence before he boarded a streetcar to take him home the old route. Down Forbes Street to the Hill, Webster Avenue, Logan Street, Wylie Avenue, where I was born, a huge Jewish enclave once, as well as black, Syrian, Irish, and Italian, mostly black by 1930, killed by the planners after the war.

The sidewalk in front of the Beacon Pharmacy was double, maybe quadruple in width, a kind of plaza where people could gather, what went for a square in our neighborhood. When I was a junior in high school--in 1941--there was a series of fights, battles really, between the Jews of my neighborhood--high school students mostly--and the Eastern and Southern Europeans--Poles, Slovaks, Italians--of near neighborhoods, also mostly students. And one afternoon there was a huge confrontation in front of the drugstore. There were two, three hundred people there; how it started, how they got there, how the word was spread, I don't know. There were some pushes and shoves, some fringe fisticuffs, some ugly insults, but the police arrived in force to break up the crowd and send everyone home. It was literally an invasion of our streets, our living space, by outsiders from other parts of the city coming to intimidate and assault the Jews. Cars couldn't get through, or trucks or streetcars, till the police arrived. There were some knives and clubs, in addition to fists, and there would have been a lot of bloodshed if the police hadn't come.

I don't think America was officially at war yet--it was spring or early fall. There was incredible hatred and violence, and anti-Semitism was rampant. In our case, the confrontations, the incidents, were ironically partly based on physiography--hills, rivers, and bridges--and the structure of high schools. There was geographical propinquity, but total economic, social, religious, and ethnic separation. The Jews and the non-Jews were both first or second generation, but the Jews were shopkeepers, salesmen, store managers, artisans, electricians, plumbers, and a few pharmacists, dentists, lawyers, accountants, and doctors; whereas the Eastern and Southern Europeans mostly worked in the mills or on the railads. The children of the one were at least half college-bound or readied for some "adventure," the children of the other were more doomed, as it were, to work the same jobs as their parents, and half of them left school when they reached the compulsory age, often after the tenth grade. They--their families--brought the hatred and contempt for Jews over with them--from the Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, Russia, Czechoslovakia, and combined this with the frustration and resentment they felt at their economic plight--which they also blamed on the Jews. Who had absolutely nothing to do with J&L, U.S. Steel, Pittsburgh Plate Glass, Alcoa, Gulf, Westinghouse, Mellon Bank, the Pennsylvania Railroad, or the other "oppressive" employers. They neither were owners nor managers. Indeed, in my generation, Jewish college students never studied engineering because the doors were closed to them in the large industrial firms.

The hatred didn't stop in the least during the war. In fact, it increased. One night a close friend and I--it was two, three years after the abortive riot--were leaving the Beacon Pharmacy after our usual repast. It was late September 1943; I know this because I was starting my sophomore year the very next day. The front door of the pharmacy was blocked by three strangers, people I'd never seen, in their early and mid-twenties. We were so engrossed in our conversation, sports, women, literature, the war, that we hardly noticed them. My friend's name was Bill Kahn--not the famous Billy Conn who almost knocked out Joe Louis in 1940. He was tall and athletic and a star on the University of Pittsburgh's basketball team until he suffered a severe injury that prevented him, at this time, from lifting anything or making any sudden movements. I politely and unsuspectingly excused myself and tried to get by the three strangers but they continued to block the door. "Take off your glasses, you fucking kike" was the response. As if it were a courtly challenge I started to remove my glasses with my left hand but one of them suddenly suckerpunched me, a sharp ring on his finger, in the left eye. I staggered back, dazed from the blow, toward the rear of the store where the pharmacist was standing in his nice white uniform, holding my hand against my bleeding eye, but he was no help. "I don't want any trouble in here," was what he said, so I groped my way back to the front, supporting myself on the glass cases to my left, full of powders and perfumes, past the startled diners on my right, sitting on their stools at the long soda fountain. My friend Bill couldn't do anything to help me, he would be back in the hospital if he so much as lifted a finger.

I opened the door, my glasses lost somewhere, blood coming out of my eye, and there, across the little plaza were the three of them, sneering and laughing, a little crowd gathering. I was able to find my assailant somehow, with one eye closed and the bad vision I had anyhow, and lift him up like a stick or a wet cloth and begin banging his head on the front bumper of a car, detached from the car's body as it was then, curved and sharp on top. He was unconscious in a few minutes and would have been dead in a few more, and it took the usual five or so to get me off him. I didn't for a second think of what I was doing but I came close to killing him. I felt neither righteous nor horrified, not even saddened, more than anything a little amazed at what I did. I certainly didn't feel like a hero--I just felt something happened to me that could have happened to anyone who approached that front door.

A half century later I would remember the event as typical of the ten-fifteen years of stupidity, bigotry, violence, hatred, we lived through. I'm not in the least proud of it, just a little ashamed and embarrassed, not only for myself but for the others in that cement plaza, most of all for the druggist who "didn't want trouble." My assailant's friends half carried him onto a streetcar, going toward Homestead, a number 60. Famous Homestead, scene of the steel strike, the lockout, Frick's use of the Pinkertons, the war between the strikers and the state militia, the permanent scars.

Bill Kahn's father was Ziggy Kahn, the director of the Irene Kaufman Settlement House on the Hill, the extraordinary athlete who played football opposite Jim Thorpe. Ziggy found out in an hour who it was who hit me; it turned out he was a professional boxer and because his hands were considered weapons he was barred from further boxing.

Within a few weeks my eye was better and I was reading Plato, Montaigne, Joyce, and the late plays of Shakespeare again. There was a little more violence in the next year or so, street fights, head banging, some hand wringing. There would be racial violence in Detroit and other places soon enough, but I want to save the reader. I hate to say this, but what used to be the Beacon Pharmacy is now an Eckerd and there is a Rite-Aid and a CVS down the road. Nor does Eckerd have toasted cheese sandwiches and fruit salad sundaes. Not even a soda fountain.

I remember walking by that troublesome corner one time in the winter of 1944-45. My guess is it was February 1945, and the great thaw had just begun and the world was wet and dark and dreary. Coming the other way was a friend of mine, Marvin Hadburg, limping in half-opened galoshes, a grin, as always, on his face. I don't know what was wrong with him that he was 4F so many years. But in the winter of '44, the Allied troops suddenly bogged down in the face of the huge German offensive--their last--he was called up, sent for ridiculously brief training to Fort Benning, Georgia and shipped after six weeks to Belgium and the Battle of the Bulge. He lasted a week or so, was hospitalized with badly frozen feet, and was discharged less than three months after he was drafted, a cripple for life. His father owned a small store in one of the towns around Pittsburgh, I think it was Munhall--next to Homestead--and Marvin worked there, straightening stock, selling underwear, saying good morning in Polish.

I saw Bill Kahn one time when I came back to Pittsburgh to teach at Pitt in 1980, but the fight never came up. Those were growing pains, weren't they? They'll never come up again, right? My own children were spared that foolishness. They grew up more or less civilized. What a horror that I had to interrupt my reading and arguing to bang a head on a car, and not only one time, mind you; my father and mother used to look me over if I got home first to see what was bleeding or swollen or broken. I was a ridiculous hero--like all of them, I guess. The photos of the time showed the young men with huge muscles, at moments of great physical concentration, absolutely embarrassing now to look at.

And what became of the young African American who sold Post-Gazettes, seventy or so years of age by now? What did he go through in the '60s? What did he settle for eventually? Does he remember the crazy man, Foo, who played the Dozens with him, the fat white man? Who acted like a baby, who thought it was for love? And Foo's quiet friend with the thick glasses who tried to restrain him, but laughed like a fiend sometimes and hugged him--the boy--so many years, so many decades ago.

Gerald Stern was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and earned his B.A. at the University of Pittsburgh in 1947. He is the winner of a National Book Award for poetry for This Time: New and Selected Poems. In 2005 he received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and in 2006 was elected as Chancellor of that organization. Stern splits his time between Easton, Pennsylvania and Lambertville, New Jersey.

“The Beacon ” by Gerald Stern, from What I Can't Bear Losing. Copyright © 2003 by Gerald Stern. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company.

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